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The Creative Society is an arts employment charity that helps young people into jobs in the creative and cultural industries.

Casual Labour: Living in the Gig Economy

The life of the modern freelance worker reminds Robbie Wojciechowski from the Creative Society’s Step Up project, of the street sellers of the Victorian era.

For the past nine months, I have existed in the fragile confines of the casual labour market. On the off days, I work in a local cafe or as a labourer. I write when there are commissions, but still struggle to make more than a day rate a week.

I’m not the only one. There are hundreds of young Londoners in situations like this: running between various precarious jobs in order to make a living. We plan ideas as sidelines to our part-time jobs, we write applications to try and find new ones, struggling and pushing against the everyday difficulties of gig economy work.

It might be that shift patterns are short, or just that there isn’t work going. It might be that the owner is off sick, or the shutters aren’t working on the cafe. It might be that my health isn’t up to spending another day smashing up bricks or sweeping up a dusty building site. It might be that the untrained supervisor running the bar can’t find the staff to cover the rest of the shifts. But it’s these hundreds of everyday, small-time irritations that make working at this level often so difficult.

I’ve thought a lot about working life for a London freelancer. It’s led me to often referring back to the Victorian author Henry Mayhew and his tales of London labour.

Published in the 1840s, Mayhew’s book London Labour and the London Poor, is a collection of essays about working life, tracking in great detail the precarious and unsteady lives of the Victorian workforce. But it can be read like an archive, giving us a deep look into the kind of struggles faced by workers in the city at that point in time.

The essays are rich personal accounts of people’s occupations, and whilst Mayhew was often concerned with the financial aspects of their work, he also aimed to offer a voice to the culture of work that existed in Victorian London. His essays shunt us back in time, into regular working lives and struggles, that many people working in London would empathise with today.

Mayhew walked through London and listened to the stories of the people who worked there. He tracked the stories of everyone from the dockers who waited for work on the quayside of an early morning, to the costermongers and street sellers who would ply their trade in their local markets. His accounts even pay attention to the astrologists and the theatre performers, who would rig up booths on the high-street in which to perform their shows.

But reading his work has often led to me think about how a modern day version of the book might look. His accounts often talk about the rather schizophrenic nature of work in the city. But they also pay attention to the precariousness of these jobs, and the struggles of many to make a living from creativity.

While biding my time between applications for more regular work, I’ve been interviewing other people facing similar situations to find out what their biggest barrier to finding consistent work in the current economy is.

Exposing the issue

In thinking about Mayhew’s writing I wanted to create a version that would work for a modern society. His stories echo so many modern working lives, their voice and struggle so similar to the kind of in-work struggles many face across the UK. But what they do, better than any news story on the issue, is focus on the more tentative and sensitive discussions when it comes to work. Mayhew was always careful to reflect on the health of his participants, as well as the kind of unstable living situations they were facing, and how it affected their work, issues the modern media sometimes neglects to cover.

Over the next nine months, alongside The Creative Society, we’re looking to document some of these under-reported struggles.

We want to pay attention to the issues that lead to the form of creative unemployment many are suffering at the heart of Britain’s economy, and understand the vastness and variety of the issues that trigger it.